Google Docs items to show up in search

The company announced the change in a blog post on Thursday. "In about two weeks, we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines," Google blogger Marie F wrote.

Only documents that have been published using the 'Publish as web page' or 'Publish/embed' option and that are linked to from a publicly crawled web page will be crawled, according to the post. Documents published with the option 'Allow anyone with the link to view' will not get crawled.

In addition, users can choose to unpublish documents they wish to remain uncrawled.

Some users of the search giant's suite of online productivity applications have expressed concerns about the plan, suggesting better labeling of potentially crawlable documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

This article was originally posted on CNET News.